THE BLACK HOLE PASSES by John Varley

Sexual language warning When a distant star cluster beams a stream of data to a location outside of the Solar System, a man and woman located in separate satellites (who are purportedly competing to capture and analyze the stream) communicate with each other holographically, sharing as much love as loneliness; but they are endangered when a black hole follows a trajectory which passes near their stations. Originally published in the June 1975 issue of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Re-published in two anthologies: SF Choice 77, and The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF in 2009; then in multiple collections of the author's stories - in 1978 alone there were three: a Dutch one, The Persistence of Vision, and In the Hall of the Martian Kings, a German one in 1981, and Good-Bye, Robinson Crusoe and Other Stories in 2013. Read by Darrell T. Smith II for my channel Quasar Spectra. Support me with a contribution: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?busine... Buy The Persistence of Vision: https://www.amazon.com/Persistence-Vi...